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What are you leading?
Together with 2 other Teach For Austria alumni – Julian Richter and Nina Poxleitner - I founded the social business MORE THAN ONE PERSPECTIVE (MTOP). MTOP’s mission is to make refugees´ potential accessible to the labor market, connect refugees to companies and break down negative stereotypes. MTOP offers an advanced training program that offers various workshops, training and mentoring to prepare highly qualified refugees for 6 months to enter the labor market in Austria. We enable them to find work suited to their skills, knowledge and experience and connect them to companies. This also helps employers to find talent and increase the diversity of their staff. We started our first program in October 2016. Since then more than 100 associates (that is how we call our participants) have joined the program. By now we already have 30 alumni. 80% of our alumni have started an internship or job in 20 different companies e.g. Deloitte, Western Union, Strabag – just to name some of our partners.
See our film for more details.
How did your experiences as a fellow inspire or prepare you for what you’re doing now?
On a personal level my time at NMS Wendstattgasse has been the most formative and inspiring in my life. Enabling children to overcome existing obstacles and supporting them to work towards a promising career made me realize that impact can be triggered by one person on a small scale even in a stagnant system. However, what I was confronted with in school was less the consequence of a malfunctioning school system but more the consequence of non-integration. It became clear to me that if we hold on to existing measures of integration we will inevitably face problems on different levels in the near future.
Julian Richter and Nina Poxleitner experienced the fellowship in a very similar way and that was the beginning of MTOP.
First of all, during my time with Teach for Austria I got to know many inspirational people who are willing to make a change. I think the community Teach for Austria creates and the spirit within really enables a drive for change. To meet those people, especially Julian and Nina, was the first and I think most important step for MTOP to start off in the beginning, as founding with the right people is crucial for success.
Being in the class room teaches you to master the learning-by doing approach and to continuously improve what you’re doing, always questioning if it leads to the intended impact. I think this is a major skill to create the desired change through the right actions within society.
The spirit of the Teach for Austria community also gave me/us the strength to not only come up with an idea, but really come from our vision to action.
What is more, Teach for Austria supported MTOP, especially in the beginning, in many ways. For the first 6 months they provided us with office space to really kick start our project. Until today they support us in questions concerning legal contracts, network partners, etc. and serve as a very valuable sparing partner.